Daily Mail, Thursday, August 29, 2019 Page 15
QQQin the Channel 4 reality TV series Cali-
fornia Dreaming, about a group of young
Britons sharing a house in LA while try-
ing to crack Hollywood.
She appeared frequently in the tab-
loids, often posing in sexy lingerie or, one
occasion, in a ‘naughty maid’ outfit. She
claimed in interviews that, having grown
up in the south of France, she was
relaxed about nudity ‘as long as it’s done
tastefully’, adding: ‘It’s empowering to
pose nude – after all, the female body
can be a very beautiful thing.’ She also
described herself as a ‘flirting expert’.
But her beauty has not always been a
blessing. Years before her allegations
about Epstein, she talked about exploi-
tation at the hands of older men.
‘I discovered you can’t walk around
with a plate of hot food and expect peo-
ple not to eat it,’ she said in 2004. ‘Older
men are worse. They know young women
are impressed with power and wealth
and they manipulate it.’
By her own account, she experienced
this kind of manipulation – and abuse –
at the age of 17, months after leaving the
security of her £38,000-a-year boarding
school in Wiltshire.
While working as a fledgling model in
Paris in 1995, she says she was attacked
and held against her will for two days by
one of fashion’s most powerful men after
he locked her in his apartment.
‘There were no door handles because
the place was so modern that everything
had electric keypads,’ she recounted in a
2004 interview. ‘Only he knew the codes.
I couldn’t get out. He said to me, “I
would really like you to stay.”
‘At the time I had all these thoughts in
my head. I didn’t know this guy, what hewas capable of doing. He said he would
take me back after I’d had a drink with
him. He continually demanded sex.’
As the situation escalated, she said the
unnamed man chased her and ripped
her dress. ‘He kept trying to pin me
down and pull himself on top of me, then
when I pushed him away he would go off
and take drugs. When he came back I
was terrified because he was manic.’S
HE said that when he finally
agreed to let her go, she ran out
and shouted to him that she
was going to call the police. ‘He
said: “Who do you think they will believe,
some 17-year-old who’s a bit drunk?” It
sounds ridiculous now but at 17, when
someone says that, you think they are
right. So I didn’t do anything and I didn’t
tell anyone about it.
‘It took me a long time to trust people
afterwards and I still have flashbacks.
He made me feel it was my fault and that
I deserved it. And I don’t think I was the
first. He had probably done this lots of
times to other girls.’
She never named her attacker ‘because
he is very well known in the modelling
world and heavily into fashion’.
While Anouska threw herself into a
modelling career in which she appeared
on billboard posters for the French fash-
ion brand Guy Laroche at 19 and became
the face – and body – of the lingerie
brand Pussy Glamore, she later painted
a picture of the industry as an empty,
soulless world. She described how she
became anorexic in her efforts to remain
thin and took drugs and drank too muchthanks
to mean-
ingless’
friendships.
‘You live in
a world which
is make-believe
and damaging,’
she told The Mail
on Sunday in 2004.
‘You are constantly
rejected, which makes
you feel inadequate.’
Despite moving to live in
Los Angeles and being
described as ‘fiercely ambi-
tious’ by those who know her,
success in Hollywood has proved
elusive. Nor was she successful at
reinventing herself as a singer 15
years ago after she worked with Rob-
bie Williams’s voice coach and song-
writer Nile Rodgers and launched her
own album.
More recently, her life appears to have
taken a happier turn. Five years ago she
gave birth to a daughter, Aurelia, with
her partner Ben Edwards, a musician
who is also studying for a masters in
clinical psychology, and she now lives in
Los Angeles permanently.
But while she has made a life for herself
in the City of Lights, the quest for
fame and fortune in Hollywood has
undoubtedly been a painful one for
Anouska de Georgiou.
The few words she said in court this
week were clearly just the beginning. For
her story is a reminder of just how vul-
nerable young women can be when they
set out in pursuit of fame and fortune,
and the heavy price many of them have
been forced to pay for their dreams.Damaged life
of Epstein’s
British sex
accuser
Speaking out:
Anouska de
GeorgiouShe went to Kate’s school
and entered a glittering
social world as a top model
— but she’s still haunted by
her encounter with Prince
Andrew’s depraved pal